PENELOPE, Somerset Maugham's Play Rendered as a Short Story

Описание: What happens when love is given too freely?

Penelope O’Farrell has adored her husband Dickie for five years, three months, and two days—without pause, without question, without measure. She has kissed him at the door, hovered at his chair, and poured devotion until it overflowed the cup. But now Dickie has found time for another woman, the dazzling Ada Fergusson, and Penelope’s perfect arithmetic of hearts has collapsed.

Summoning her eccentric family—a pompous uncle, a missionary mother, a mathematician father, and a baffled solicitor—Penelope announces she will divorce her beloved. Yet her father proposes a stranger remedy: win him back not with passion, but with silence, absence, and mystery. What follows is a comedy of telegrams gone wrong, invented patients, hats bought in defiance, and a mistress who discovers she was never truly loved.

Witty, sharp, and wickedly observant, Penelope is a tale of how love must sometimes be rationed like sugar, played like music, and solved like mathematics—because even in marriage, two and two only make four if both agree on the sum.